Generating Identicons

November 2013 · 2 minute read

Identicons are icons that are generated from some form of user information. They usually serve to fill the gaps left by photo-less users that don’t provide a photo as unique(ish) identifiers for users.

These are usually generated by hashing the chosen user data and then using that hash to flip image pixels on and off. The following code snippit is a Java implementation of this concept and generates a 5*5 pixel, horizontally symmetrical identicon much like the ones github recently rolled out.